Talking Thai–English–Thai Dictionary

Talking Thai–English–Thai Dictionary

for Windows PCs

for Windows PCs

Overview

Traveling to Thailand? Learning the Thai language? Imagine having
instant access to 150,000+ English and Thai entries right on your
Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10 desktop or laptop
computer, with high-quality sound recordings of a native speaker for
every Thai word, and superb dictionary entries hand-crafted by Paiboon
Publishing with the needs of native English speakers in mind. If
you're not familiar with the Thai alphabet, you can look up Thai words
by their sound, with an easy-to-use, English-like pronunciation guide.
Perfect for the casual traveler or the dedicated Thai learner.

NEWS FLASH: We are currently working on a
massive 2.0 upgrade to the Windows dictionary app that has been more
than two years in the making. The 2.0 upgrade will include thousands
of new Thai words suggested by dictionary users over the past two
years, as well as all the features and vocabulary of our
Thai Phrasebook app, including full-text
search, thousands of complete, ready-to-use customizable phrases
divided into 250+
practical categories like "Hotel," "Ordering Food,"
"Renting a Place," and "Price Haggling," and a Favorites feature that
lets you save and organize words and phrases you are learning.
This release will also add to our Windows product many features which
until now have only been available in our iOS and Android products,
such as Find Words Inside and Explain Spelling.
We expect to release the 2.0 dictionary in early 2016. Note that unlike
iOS and Android, we do not plan to release a separate phrasebook app
for Windows. See our
Thai phrasebook and dictionary app product comparison page.

Whether you are visiting Thailand for a short while or
living there, you will find most of the vocabulary used in everyday
life, including basic medical, cultural, political and scientific
terms.
150,000+ entries: more than five times as many as Paiboon
Publishing's 2009 printed volume.
Plus an additional 28,000 place
name entries (not counted above) that help you to pinpoint
geographical locations in Thailand.

Works even when you're in a taxi or a countryside street market and
not connected to the internet: all entries and sounds are stored right
on your computer, and you will incur no data
charges when you use the app.

You've probably noticed that the Thai letters appearing on signs and
menus in Thailand often look nothing like what you learned in
textbooks. A unique new feature of our dictionary is that
you can tap on any Thai word and see that word written in a set of
real-world fonts that you are likely to see on signs, menus,
documents, and even in Thai handwriting. It's an indispensable
feature for getting around the country:

Every single Thai word is accompanied by an easy-to-read,
English-like Thai Sound pronunciation guide (also known as
"Transliteration" or "Phonetics"), so you can learn to speak and
recognize Thai words immediately, without needing to learn
Thai script. Our pronunciation guides give you the tones
and everything else you need to understand and to be understood.

We even let you choose which pronunciation guide system you want to
use from a list of 12 popular systems.

With a single touch in our app settings screen, all pronunciation
guides throughout the app transform into your chosen system, and you
can even look up Thai words by sound using your chosen system.

Most dictionary and phrasebook apps let you look up English words, and
some also let you look up Thai words using Thai script.
But Paiboon's revolutionary three-way design bridges the gap for English
speakers by introducing a third option where you can Search-by-Sound™: you can look up
Thai words that you hear by their sound using the same easy-to-read
pronunciation guide.
Hear someone say "sanuk?" Type "s-a-n-u-k" to
find out what it means:

Search-by-Sound™ has been a hallmark of all Paiboon dictionary and
phrasebook products since Paiboon's first Thai products in 2002.

For more information on Search-by-Sound™ and why it's so useful for
Thai, see this section.

In addition to our signature Paiboon+ pronunciation guide system, the
same system used in all Thai learning materials from Paiboon Publishing, this
software lets you choose from 11 other pronunciation guide systems:

With a single touch in our app settings screen, all pronunciation
guides transform into your chosen system, and you can even look up
Thai words by sound using your chosen system.

Our app includes a comprehensive, interactive introduction to the Thai
language, including a "Speaking and Understanding" section with
clickable sounds, and a "Reading and Writing" section with examples of
Thai letters in multiple, real-world fonts.

Unlike typical dictionaries and phrasebooks based on free, often
low-quality data meant for Thai natives, our superb Paiboon
Publishing dictionary entries are hand-crafted by a team of
Thai- and
English-native editors with your needs in mind.

Entries are richly annotated for native English speakers so you know
the exact meaning of each Thai word and phrase you use
(for example,
the entry for "glass" clarifies "drinking glass" vs "pane of glass,"
which translate differently in Thai)
including slang and formal variants.

Classifiers are a critical part of Thai grammar, needed for even basic
usage. Our dictionary provides crucial classifiers for more than
15,000 noun entries—a first in the industry. Our language
introduction tells you how and when to use them.

As you are reading any dictionary entry, you can tap on any
Thai or English word in that entry to search for that word.
This can be a great way to explore different shades of meaning and
learn new, related words.

Also, you can tap on any part of speech or other symbol to go
directly to the relevant section of our language
guide to learn more.

As you look up words, help pages, or use the other special features of
our app, you can always touch the back button to get back where you
were, just like a web browser.

When typing English or Thai Sound pronunciation with our dictionary,
you can choose either your standard system keyboard (or any other third-party
keyboard that is available to other apps on your device) or you can
choose the built-in specialized, custom Paiboon keyboard, which
is exclusive to our app. The Paiboon Keyboard features large,
readable key labels and only presents the keys you need for searching
in the dictionary.

The Paiboon keyboard frees you from typical Thai keyboards that have
tiny labels that are nearly impossible for non-Thais to read, and
include several obsolete "decoy" letters not used for any word in
modern Thai (especially ฃ ฅ) that look almost exactly
like common letters (ข ช ซ ค ด ต) and often lead to failed
searches (for more see
this FAQ item).

Try Before You Buy

On this website, you can download a free, limited trial version that
allows you to experience the look and feel of the program (its
fonts, features, and sound quality). The limited trial version has
around 150 words per section.

Search-by-Sound™ is what puts Paiboon Publishing's dictionaries
and phrasebooks so far ahead of the competition, and now this
indispensable capability is available on your computer.

The Problem

As you may know, Thai has its own alphabet which is nothing like
English and takes a long time to learn. And even if you know the Thai
alphabet, there are multiple ways of writing the same sound. For
example, there are 4 letters that sound like an "s," 5 letters that
sound like a "k," and 6 letters that sound like a "t"!
So, looking up a Thai word that you hear
is difficult even for a seasoned scholar.

The Solution: Search-by-Sound™

What if you could simply look up what you hear?
Search-by-Sound™, a hallmark of all Paiboon dictionaries and
phrasebooks since Paiboon's first Thai product in 2002, lets you do
just this.

It all starts with pronunciation guide systems. Paiboon Publishing
has developed an easy-to-use pronunciation guide system called
"Paiboon+," which spells out Thai words using English-like letters.
With Paiboon+, there is just one simple way to write each sound.
There are other pronunciation guide systems too, and if you're already
familiar with another system, our app lets you choose from
amongst 12 different systems in use today.

Every Thai word in our dictionary is written with the Thai alphabet
and also with your chosen pronunciation guide systems. But
Search-by-Sound™ takes that one step further: you
can look up a Thai word by its pronunciation guide.

For example, if you hear someone say "sanuk," you just type
"s-a-n-u-k":

The app provides you with the exact pronunciation, the word written
using Thai script, the definition, and you can even touch to
hear a high quality sound recording of a
native Thai speaking that word.

Conquer Those Terrible Tones

Thai is a tonal language: in addition to having particular
vowels and consonants, each syllable has a particular pitch contour
(middle, low, falling, high, or rising).
When you listen, you must recognize those tones to fully understand.
When you speak, you must use the tones to be understood. Needless to
say, this is often hard for native English speakers.

Search-by-Sound™ makes this much easier by allowing you to
search for a word without needing to know its tones. You can then
look at all the possibilities and choose the correct meaning from
context.

Throughout our app, Thai words are always shown in both
Thai script and using a pronunciation guide. So, if
you look up an English word, you can rely on the pronunciation guide
to help you pronounce the word correctly and be understood.

The Talking Thai–English–Thai Dictionary and Paiboon's other Thai
language materials, both printed and electronic, work perfectly
together because they share a common teaching method and a common set
of pronunciation guide systems (for more detail on pronunciation guide
systems, see
Search-by-Sound™).

If you have a mobile device, don't miss out on this indispensable
Thai learning app from Paiboon Publishing:

Version 2.0 features include: Increase text size: small, medium,
large; autoplay an entire lesson; show or hide English text; added
English voice, which can be turned on or off. Teaches speaking,
listening and reading Thai with a native speaker and over 3,000
clearly recorded words and phrases. Follows the format of the best
selling Thai for Beginners book. Provides examples of the five tones
in Thai. Test your knowledge with build in exercises. Detailed Help
section within the app. After downloading it works without an Internet
connection: no data charges.